Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 64
October 6, 2011
Freelance Nation
IT'S BEEN CALLED the Gig Economy, Freelance Nation, the Rise of the Creative Class, and the e-conomy, with the "e" standing for electronic, entrepreneurial, or perhaps eclectic. Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. We're no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we're part-time lawyers-cum- amateur photographers who write on the side.
Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed.
And, perhaps most surprisingly, many of them love it.
via The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time – Sara Horowitz – Business – The Atlantic.
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Kiss a jet age masterpiece goodbye
WHILE ABC has conspicuously begun to celebrate the early jet age, the Port Authority has begun to tear it down.
Terminal 6 at Kennedy International Airport — a crisp island of aesthetic tranquility by the master architect I. M. Pei — is being demolished. The boarding gates are already piles of rubble. The main pavilion, whose white steel roof seems to float ethereally over cascades of diaphanous green glass, is expected to come down by the end of October.
via I. M. Pei's Terminal 6 Is Being Demolished – NYTimes.com.
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October 5, 2011
October 4, 2011
Have Slides, Will Travel
OCTOBER brings the smells of burning leaves, the warmth of hot cider, and much speaking for yours truly:
On October 12, I'll deliver the keynote address at Do It With Drupal 2011 at the Marriott Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn Heights, sharing the stage with the likes of Josh Clark, Angela Byron, and Jeff Robbins.
Then it's off to beautiful Richmond, Virginia on the 13th for EdUI 2011, the conference for web professionals who serve institutions of learning, where I'll keynote again and join such leaders as Margot Bloomstein, Brian Fling, Kyle Soucy, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.
October 24–26 will find me in America's capital for An Event Apart DC: three days of design, code, and content with a veritable constellation of web design stars, including a one-day learning session on Accessible Web Design led by Derek Featherstone of Further Ahead.
You can follow my speaking schedule or, better yet, come see me! I'll keep a light in the window for you.
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October 2, 2011
Maybe stick to novels, dear.
I'VE READ THE HARRY POTTER NOVELS five times. The only other novelists who've gotten that kind of commitment out of me were DH Lawrence, Doris Lessing, and Hammet, and they are not hacks. Rowling is the Dickens (or if you prefer, the L Frank Baum) of our time. People of all ages, from all backgrounds, and at all levels of literary experience and education have been drawn into her web; our imaginations are changed, after reading her, just as people's mental landscape changed after A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, and Bleak House.
JK Rowling is not a literary stylist a la TS Elliot or a craft writer like Heminway and Hammet; her story arcs are not as neat as Jane Austen's. But she is in an incredible storytelling powerhouse and a literary talent for the ages.
I love her. I lover her work. Which is why it wounds me to see the inept pathetic 1990s style web experience her minions, at her behest, are incompetently attempting to offer.
Pottermore, the Harry Potter website, whilst in Alpha
Maybe stick to novels, dear. | Flickr
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October 1, 2011
Deck Ad Deal: Champagne Eyeballs on a Beer Budget
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That kind of reach rarely comes cheap, but we have a last-minute opening for an advertiser in October, and we'll do a nice deal for someone who can pull the trigger quick. If that someone is you, ping @decknetwork now. First come, first served.
The DECK is now taking reservations for November, December, and the first quarter of 2012.
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A Better Franklin
I'VE TWEAKED the layout here with ITC Franklin Condensed from Webtype.
It's funny. My daughter always asks what's my favorite color, and I can never answer, 'cause I love them all. With color, it depends on context and it's all about combination. But a favorite font? You bet I've got one. It's Franklin Gothic, and especially Franklin Gothic Condensed. Has been for years.
For several years now I've used a licensed Franklin Gothic web font by someone other than Webtype here. It was good but not perfect.
Webtype's Franklin Condensed is as close to perfect as web fonts can come in October, 2011. (And as they improve it, the look and feel here will improve as well.) The font is so good that it emboldened me to apply it to other parts of the page that formerly had to make do with Helvetica. See, for instance, my footer. It's not a work of art, but it's now much more pleasant to read in every environment I've tested.
I'm still conservative about web fonts (primarily because of bandwidth issues); for now this site's body text is still set in Georgia, one of the world's most beautiful screen fonts as we all agree. I'm considering loading Palatino first, for those who have it on their systems, just to take a break from the Georgia Mafia without burdening users with an additional web font download, but I haven't committed yet.
The site is long overdue for a redesign: the last redesign (e.g. the current look and feel) was a retro tribute to the site's 1990s look. A new look is coming, but for the interim, I'm very grateful to my friends at Webtype for their craftsmanship.
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September 28, 2011
OFF MY LAWN!
FROM 1996 TO 1999, I interviewed movie stars and web designers. Between 1998 and 1999, I published my favorite interviews in this little site. Then I stopped.
Here it is, just as it was — frames, buttons, cheesy JavaScript effects and all: The 15 Minutes Project.
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September 26, 2011
Download in the Dumps (AKA Killing Me Softly With Adobe)
In which our intrepid reporter is unable to download and reinstall Adobe software he owns and paid for because Adobe.
I REMOVED Adobe CS5 from my studio Mac after it took on water damage during tropical storm Irene. Just as I was going to replace the machine, the water damage seemed to go away. (It actually never did go away, and as I write this it's pretty bad, but for a week it seemed okay so I didn't order a replacement.) As I need Photoshop this morning to work on a website, and as I'm still a registered CS5 owner, I logged into Adobe.com to download a "Trial" version of Photoshop. For all the good it did me, I could have eaten my own head.
Clicking "Download Photoshop" put an "Install Adobe Download Assistant" app on my desktop instead of downloading Photoshop. To download Photoshop from the web, you can't just download Photoshop from the web. You have to download an installer that installs a downloader. There's no benefit to the user for jumping through this extra hoop, but I guess Adobe Corporate wanted to show off its AIR-based software.
To download trial versions of Creative Suite software, you need to install the Adobe Download Assistant. After installation, the Adobe Download Assistant will start your product download automatically,
the website says. This is a lie.
Once installed, the downloader asks me to sign in again. Which is only logical. After all, between the time I clicked "download Photoshop" as a signed-in user and now, I might have been knocked unconscious by Photoshop pirates. Without a redundant double sign-in, the pirates would win.
So I type in my login and password again—same as I just did on the website to download this meshugah downloader installer in the first place—and guess what? Adobe says my login and password don't match.
The login and password I used to download the installer downloader are unacceptable to the downloader. If you're following this gibberish, God bless. If not, Adobe is telling me that the login and password I just used to install the downloader are no good.
Like a pimp pretending to help a runaway teen, a link in the unhelpful downloader now asks, "Having trouble signing in?" There being nothing else to do, I click the link, which takes me to a "Reset your password" panel. Only I can't reset my password in the "Reset your password" panel; I'll only be able to reset my password on a custom web page, whose address I will only learn once I receive an email from Adobe sending me a custom link. Excitingly, that "Reset your password" page (the one that will actually allow me to reset my password) will be generated on the fly via Adobe's famous and ultra-reliable ColdFusion software.
I've now lost 30 minutes of work time but Adobe is not done with me. Oh, no. This is where the fun begins.
I spend long minutes reflexively checking my email, like a junkie scanning the corner in search of his busted dealer. The custom link email finally arrives, but the link never works. (It's the cream of the jest!) Here is a screenshot of Adobe's Chinese Japanese website, powered by ColdFusion, which is unable to generate a "Reset your password" page, allowing me to reset my password and use the AIR-based downloader software to download the software I already own.
Mission: not accomplished. Total time wasted: 45 minutes (not counting the writing of this blog post, which I do in the faint hope that Adobe will improve its customer experience). I still have no working copy of Photoshop and it's clear I won't get one today. The installer disks are gone from my office because I'm moving to a new studio soon and have been packing important pieces like installation disks ahead of time. (After all, I had reasoned, Adobe lets you download software from its website, so why keep disks around?)
To be fair, Hurricane Irene was not Adobe's fault, and lots of people suffered much worse than a water-damaged iMac. Nor is water damage to my Mac Adobe's fault. My decision to remove CS5 from the Mac was based on fear that if the Mac died and I hadn't removed CS5, I would not be able to install it on the replacement machine I intended to purchase, as Adobe licensing (and the software itself) requires you to uninstall from Machine A before installing on Machine B. Adobe CS5 costs more than the computer I intended to buy, so it seemed prudent to remove it from the damaged machine, but of course I regret that decision now, because Adobe's website won't let me update my member information, and its downloader won't let me download.
So I'll be working from home tonight, doing what I should have done today. Five little letters: ADOBE.
Breathless Update!
Apparently Adobe's entire membership section, powered by ColdFusion, is now down. Trying to do anything inside the member section leads to a Chinese "Sorry" page. This might be why the "downloader" failed to authorize my credentials. How much simpler it would be if Adobe simply provided a link to download its software (like in the old days) instead of forcing registered users to jump through broken hoops.
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September 20, 2011
A List Apart 335: Banish your inner critic; tear down the wall between designer and client
BANISH THE INNER CRITIC that blocks your creativity and tear down the wall between you and your client that design buzzwords create. It's easy with help from Issue No. 335 of A List Apart for people who make websites:
Banishing Your Inner Critic
Everybody has one: the inner critic that tells you you're just faking it, that others have more talent, that you'll never achieve the success you seek. The inner critic is an unconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great ideas and the fruits of achievement, making you hate your designs, giving you "writer's block" as your deadline looms, keeping you stuck in a project's initial thinking stage because something isn't quite right. Denise Jacobs anatomizes and shows how to quash your inner critic, giving you the mental space and energy to let your talent emerge.
Demystifying Design
by Jeff Gothelf
Mystifying design with jargon only we understand makes us feel like heroes and creates a sense of job security. But it also creates an "us and them" atmosphere which excludes non-designers, obscures the true value of design, and generates antagonism when only cooperation will yield the best product. By revealing our process and inviting others into our world, we can create a team that is invested in the success of our work, and deliver better design. Jeff Gothelf discusses the steps we can take to increase the value of our practice and of ourselves as practitioners.
Online since 1998, Happy Cog's A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Illustration by Kevin Cornell.
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